The True Nature of the Spiritual Path

The spiritual path is not some fashion accessory like a diamond ring or a fur coat.  More than an idea or concept, spirit is a part of us, one of our inborn faculties, no less than a limb or the sense of smell. But even as a part of us, the spirit is different in that it is subtle and less obvious than a world dominated by the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual.

To engage the “spirit” we must open our minds to the possibility of the “metaphysical”, to the area of brain that senses the energy of the world.  In the Lakota tradition, the phrase “Mitakuye Oyasin”, (all my relations), is invoked at ceremonies. The idea that relations exist with everything in this world, animate and inanimate, opens up the mind to the possibility of spirituality in all situations.

Atheism, the rejection of the idea of spirit, exists in cultures with human-dominated environments and advanced intellectual systems of knowledge. The valuing of spirit is more an aspect of “primitive” cultures, cultures that have a more direct relationship to nature and to death. The proximity of death is the great spiritualizer, as is shown by the many spiritual awakenings that accompany near-death experiences.

In contemporary cultures, death is neatly banished from our daily lives. We do not kill our own food, we see corpses only at open-casket funerals, and we have relegated our elders to “homes” where we don’t have to care for them anymore, instead paying others to deal with infirmity and death for us. This contrast between civilization and the “primitive” is a strong and recurrent theme in modern art, film, and literature.

It is precisely this disconnection from the presence of death that dulls our spiritual nature. It is why we find spirituality in wilderness, away from civilization where wild animals and plants are free to live and die without human intervention. The Deists and Transcendentalists of the 19^th century like the aboriginal cultures of the world found the spiritual in nature through experience rather than as a mental construct.

Without the discomforts and risks of the struggle to survive, in the midst of surplus, spirituality fades, replaced by a false sense of security. Prophets down through the ages have foreseen and expressed through poetic and artistic visions the end of surplus and the advent of struggle.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree…

And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war!.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The fall of civilizations follows on the heels of luxury and amorality, equated with the absence of spirituality. It was Plato who wrote that …”All boys should be raised as bastards,” meaning that boys need to have struggle in order to become responsible and mature men, and decried the effects of opulence and luxury. The Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden is the fall from grace, like the Fall of Icarus who ignored his father’s advice and so flew too close to the sun and drowned.

If we wish to remain sober in our lives, we must acknowledge the inevitability of our own death, and the web of life of which we are only a part. In that sense our spiritual path, the spiritual aspect of the life that we live, is greatly influenced by our immediate and empirical contact with raw nature. This is why the aboriginal cultures of the world have a palpable relationship to both spirit and nature.

It is why many flock to wilderness for spiritual connection. In the wilderness experience there is danger. There is the personal requirement of self-reliance amidst numerous deadly perils: Drowning in a river, falling from a cliff, confronting a wild animal, getting caught in a storm, running out of food.

Combined with meditation and contemplation in nature, one’s spirit can be awakened. Thoreau described in Walden his sensing of what he termed “The Oversoul”, what the Native Americans refer to as the “Great Spirit”. One is reminded of the life of Jesus who lived in the desert for years and later railed against the materialism of the money changers in the temple; of Siddhartha who left the royal luxury of his upbringing where infirmity and death had been eliminated from his presence, and  became the Buddha, the Awakened One; of John Muir, the son of a Presbyterian minister for whom the Sierra Nevada mountains became the temple where he worshipped.

The wilderness experience can be the key to awakening one’s spiritual awareness, and bringing the values of personal morality into daily life causes one to learn to live without luxury and surplus, and culminates in the end of materialism. It is in the origin of religions that spirituality overcomes materialism, and is a necessity for the survival of a culture that has lost its way. Environmentalism is nothing less than the modern version of reawakening the spirit as a response to a materialistic culture that has ignored the ancient values of the spirit, putting itself in deadly jeopardy.

Flesherton, Ontario, Canada

In the Grand Scale of the Cosmos,

Is a whole beyond words and meaning,

An experience entire

Without subdivision or gleaning.

Some call it the Lord of Creation,

The Oversoul, Allah, or Tao;

Some term it Quetzalcoatl,

The unity of here and now.

This wholistic experiential being

Feels eternal presence, and

Extending as far as the eye can see,

Penetrates to elemental essence.

The prophets divine this cosmic present,

Terming it God, the Creator of

The universe both far and near,

The omnipotent, omniscient source of Love.

Such a world view is all-encompassing,

Leaving no stone unturned,

Neglecting nothing in its accounting of

The knowledge for which we yearn.

Religion stems from this ecstatic state,

This wholistic holiest holy.

The supernal senses revel in joy,

Basking in the glory,

As all in this revealed vision is

But part of God’s holy creation.

Then all is sacred, all divine,

To be treated with divine dispensation.

One finds this transcendent experience

Alone among the stars, or

In a vast field of flowers, or

At the ocean with Venus and Mars.

One finds in the world’s natural state

The original work of God,

In the mountains, rivers, and waterfalls,

In the flora and fauna of this sod.

A new religion is coming soon,

A prophecy, a revelation, a sooth;

A synthesis of all fields of knowledge,

A Universal Truth.

The environment is a new concept,

A systems approach to thinking,

Einstein replacing Newton and Descartes,

Relativity, not mechanical clinking.

Wholism is both correct and sacred,

There is no compartmentalization,

All causes related to all effects,

A continuum of conceptualization,

Not dualism, not reductionism,

Not bio-materialist thought,

Not semantical theistic jargon,

Not monomaniacal rot;

But rather the Great Unity through

The practice of spiritual living

Supported by reason and research,

By philanthropy and giving.

One does not find this ultimate experience

In a dark and dusty corner of

A church or chapel laden with Colonial gold,

The room filled with darkly dressed mourners.

One must seek it in the more natural way,

Found in the pristine forest,

Unspoiled, unfettered by crass commercialism,

Uncut by the chain saw’s force.

Environmentalism is

A religion unto itself,

An alternative to anthropocentrism,

Stressing ecology and health.

Humanity is a part of Nature,

Not nature’s enemy personified.

We are stewards of this holy land,

Gardeners with God’s love inside.

NBS

10-4-09

Klein Bottle

Mobius Strip

That One-Sided Thing They Call The Tao

Like a Klein bottle or a Mobius strip

The Tao has only one side.

Curved surfaces interfacing

Leave only one path to ride.

Beyond duality, transcending yin & yang,

Beyond gender, beyond race,

Ageless, invisible, silent, touchless,

A mask without a face.

There is no dark side to this surface

It is darkness and light combined.

It is the sound of one hand clapping,

It is the essence of the mind.

Hailed by priest and scholars alike,

Often referred to as God,

It is clothed and animated in puppetry,

Given life through a divining rod.

It cannot be misused for there is

But one door, one lock, one key.

The door is the heart,

Love is the lock, and

The key is sincerity.

The mentality pulsates so lightly upon the world,

Invisible emanations vibrating with every word.

Surrounding us is an ocean of universal being,

Waves of energy carried by this medium unseen.

So whence comes the individual rhythm of each mind?

Do we harmonize with the music around us keeping time?

Or does our spirit emanate from its own internal clock,

Its own life force and unique rhythm, its own measure and stop?

Are we driven by external pulses or by ourselves?

The individual or the collective, are we just cells?

Do swarming bees or schools of fish determine by selection

The muscle twitch, the fin or wing’s least wiggle for direction?

A flock of birds or herd of antelope move all together.

It’s the straggler, the isolated one that feeds the leopard.

Yet many species hunt alone, the panther and the cougar,

But even then they kill to feed a family, not for pleasure;

And finally then there is still the reality of life;

We’re born unique and die one by one, a solitary strife.

Within our heart beats and our brainwave patterns follow suit,

For each of us within, the individual takes root.

In short we blend individual, community, and world,

The forces to which we adapt, the musical vortex whirls.

No question that we are a force ourselves to be reckoned with,

Each a unique vibration, each a veritable glyph.

But not alone without context do we survive on this Earth.

We blend with our fellow sapiens and Life, to death from birth.

Our life a concert, we play first fiddle, our friends play the strings.

The rest of life the orchestra, the conductor is the king,

The essence, the progenitor, the Path, the Way, the Force;

God, if you will, but faceless, nameless, all-powerful, the Course.

Global deleveraging means economic restructuring,

Contract renegotiation,

Property revaluation,

Derivative reassessment,

Pyramids and true confessions,

Mark to market causes subtraction

Triggering regulatory action,

Default, foreclosure, bankruptcy,

Slipping the noose of the fiduciary

Debt, debt, debt, and more borrowing,

No safehouse for value storing,

Nor gold nor oil nor art nor gems

As on falling currency they depend.

Unemployment, loss of income,

More and more go unpaid,

The vicious cycle of downward pressure,

As prices and wages slide down the grade,

Bonds and credit getting tighter,

As community needs go unmet,

Police and fire, education,

Prisons and bureaucrats, roads and the vet,

All learning how to do with less,

After decades of patronage and largess,

Consumption conspicuous without end,

An appointment with judgment it portends.

Now will America learn to cope

With real needs, not booze and dope.

Food and security, heat and light,

Clothes for the poor, and warmth in the night,

Not thousands of gadgets and SUVs,

Swimming pools and huge TVs..

It is now that leadership faces the test,

To unite in peace, not divide through conquest.

The restructuring’s real,

No way to avoid,

This will take a few years

The frauds to void and

Replace with a social contract that’s fair.

That’s all the people want, not gas and hot air.

NBS

2-9-09

Alameda

It was while meditating that this poem came to me.  It is so subtle, and so broad.  I was looking at wood grain when it came to me that we are like onions, layered, and at the center is love of being.

The Heart Of Love

Within the chambers of deepest awareness,

In the center of consciousness,

Pulses, beats the universal,

Life giving,

Warmth generating

Motive force:

The love of Life.

Its protection is behind all of our decisions.

Its value is supported by all other values;

From this center emanates all our choices,

Our decisions, our actions:

Thoughts, words, and deeds.

That love is Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit,

The realm of infinite awareness,

Of cosmic consciousness,

The unity of being.

The suggestion here is that our conscious mind experiences deepest feelings in the center of our being, and that at that center is the connection to Life, the collective unconscious.  It may be hard to accept that it is that simple, that at our core we are like all living beings, that we love life and adhere to and protect it.  But it can be that simple.  

Disease of the mind and emotions clouds that understanding, as that energy of the core may become inaccessible to the mind, and our choices may spin out of control, from disconnection to the core.  This is where  Core Energetics comes in to explain how we may lose touch with that energy as our protective reactions to the forces around us may shut down our perceptions of the outside world and disconnect our core from the outer world, hidden behind a protective wall that encloses us.  At our heart is unity of being.

I visited the new California Academy of Sciences building at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco with my family over the Christmas holidays.  The new building includes the old Steihardt Aquarium and Planetarium, an exhibit on global warming, other exhibits, and a rain forest environment.  It was a Sunday before Christmas and the lines were long to get in even at the $25 admission fee.

It was a rainy day.  The fields of plants on the rooftop were happy, as we climbed the spiral ramp leading to the top of the rainforest.    Everywhere there were birds and butterflies.

As I communed with the chameleons, they evinced a deep knowledge of the nature of existence.  These reptiles gave me a clue about life – that it is not to be statically enjoyed, that change is a fundamental characterisic of deep spirituality.  The Book of Changes also told us that.